Tag: music

January 5, 2019

I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. My list-making secret is to start a “long list” of albums I like at the beginning of the year. I keep adding when something strikes my fancy and use the year-end holidays to figure out which ones really made the cut.

I feel this was another good year for music although I didn’t find as many of the mainstream releases inspiring this year. Kacey Musgraves is probably the only chart hit on the list. And really only one straight-up rock band this year – She Drew The Gun.

I’ve made a concerted effort to listen to women more. More female musicians, authors, directors, commentators, etc. It’s been very fruitful and is reflected in this list. 17 of my Top 30 are by women or bands with women in them.

And now, my Top 30 Albums of 2018! Enjoy!

Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank-order these — it would change daily.

January 6, 2018

I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. My list-making secret is to start a “long list” of albums I like at the beginning of the year. I keep adding when something strikes my fancy and use the year-end holidays to figure out which ones really made the cut.

Overall I think it was a pretty good year for music. I loved the new sounds coming out of Toronto. Drake and The Weeknd have had such an impact on the music in the city and I’d say it’s been largely positive. More of that please. And I found myself returning repeatedly to more electronic, meditative soundscapes. Not sure if it’s me or the mood of the times.

Beyond the list here, I also listed to a lot of classical — digging in to the Harmonia Mundi catalogue — and jazz — Blue Note and ECM catalogues in particular.

And now, my Top 30 Albums of 2017! Enjoy!

Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely — it would change daily.

January 14, 2017

I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. My list-making secret is to start a “long list” of albums I like at the beginning of the year. I keep adding when something strikes my fancy and use the year-end holidays to figure out which ones really made the cut.

December 31, 2015

I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. My list-making secret is to start a “long list” of albums I like at the beginning of the year. I keep adding when something strikes my fancy and use the year-end holidays to figure out which ones really made the cut.

There are seven females (or female lead bands) on the list this year — same as last year, but better than 2013. This year I notice the laid-back sound of many of these albums and I’m particularly struck by the split between other-worldly electronic stuff and rootsy singer-songwriter stuff.

I’d say the Allan Rayman album is my favorite of the year that just about no one knows about.

Finally, this list was made a bit harder this year with the shutting down of Rdio and my move to Spotify thereafter. Having tried them all, I still think Rdio had the best service with a good understanding of how community can make a service richer and increase lock-in. I don’t think the race to be the ultimate music streaming service is near complete — I only hope we can keep the competition healthy and innovating until we get there.

January 18, 2015

I was soooo close to not publishing my Top 30 list this year. But after some thought I realized there was a lot of good music this year and future me would kick 2015 me in the ass for not taking a bit of time to acknowledge that.

I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. My list-making secret is to start a “long list” of albums I like at the beginning of the year. I keep adding when something strikes my fancy and use the year-end holidays to figure out which ones really made the cut.

There are seven females (or female lead bands) on the list this year. Better than last year’s dismal four. This list also got much more obscure this year. In the past I’ve found lots of interesting and popular albums for this list — things like Black Keys, Beyoncé, Kanye West, and Daft Punk for example. While I listened to a lot of pop this year I didn’t truly connect with anything and I didn’t see anything moving music forward as sometimes happens. The list this year is therefore more personal. It’s also more electronic and quieter than in past years. I’m really interested in music that leaves lots of space.

I’m a bit late publishing my traditional year-end “Top 30 Albums” list this year, but it’s a good one, so I hope you’ll forgive me.

I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. My list-making secret is to start a “long list” of albums I like at the beginning of the year. I keep adding when something strikes my fancy and use the year-end holidays to figure out which ones really made the cut.

Beyoncé’s stealth release is probably the most popular album on the list this year and I’m pretty sure Dawn of Midi’s is the most obscure. I was a bit surprised to see only four females on the list when a third of the list was female last year. My long-list had a lot more females but they didn’t have the impact as in past years. Interestingly, many of the bands had female members.

January 5, 2013

It has become my tradition to publish a year-end “Top 30 Albums” list — at least it’s a tradition if three years in a row makes a tradition. Last year I posted my Top 30 Albums of 2011 and the year before I had my Top 30 Albums of 2010.

While I love doing this to help others discover great music, it’s actually more important for me personally as it drives me to stay on top of new music all year long. In fact, next week I’ll start building my “Top 30 Albums of 2013” list!

I’m really happy with the 2012 list. Lots of new acts — Jack White is probably the closest to a mainstream rock act on the list — and lots of geographic diversity with bands from Canada and the US abut also Iceland, Norway, Sweden, The UK, and Australia. Hell, I’ve got two bands from Iceland in my Top 30. I’m also happy I ended up with 10 or so female vocalists without any conscious effort on that front.

Here you go! Enjoy!

Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely — it would change daily.

July 31, 2011

When I was young (in the sixties) my parents weren’t really into music. But we had the radio on all the time. We listened to Easy Listening stations. This naturally drove me crazy. But it also embedded these songs in my head.

This BBC 4 documentary (below in six parts) is well worth watching if you’ve either never really heard of Easy Listening or if you (as I did) simply dismissed it as irrelevant.

January 8, 2011

I’ll let you in on a secret: If you’re going to do a “Best of…” list, wait until the year is over so you can see what everybody else thought was the best and add to your own list.

This is not cheating. No one can keep up with all the music, books, movies and what-not that we clever mammals produce each year. I keep a running list of my favourite albums and add and delete from that list as the year goes on. But then I see other people’s end-of-year lists and realize that I missed a ton of great stuff. So, while I completely ignore retrospective news stories and generally turn my nose up at “what’s going to happen next year” commentary, I find “Best of…” for media a great way to grow and learn.

So, having digested a ton of other people’s lists and thought about my own favourites from 2010, here are my top 30 albums for the year.

Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely — it would change daily.

December 2, 2007

Not all punks were guys. Siouxsie Sioux was part of the Bromley Contingent along with Sid Vicious and Billy Idol and started a band called Siouxsie and The Banshees very early on. At the start I think the band was more a concept — a desire to be in a band rather than a band in fact.

But after a while they got the hang of it and became on of the few bands to move out of the early punk days and have successful careers as “punk” became “new wave”.

October 20, 2007

For most people, the Sex Pistols were punk rock. We loved the Pistols but I never connected with them the way I did with The Ramones, or The Clash or even The Buzzcocks. The Pistols were one of the few influential bands of the time that I didn’t see live and I think that always made them a bit more of an abstraction for me. Punk was so much about the live experience it was harder to identify with a band you hadn’t seen live.

Now we would have seen the Pistols live had they come anywhere near Canada. Malcolm McLaren (“The Manager” as Johnny refers to him) was determined not to do anything by the books and booked the first (and only) US tour in the deep south, playing dive bars and honky tonks rather than hitting the major urban centres that had already established punk scenes.

This footage was taken at CBGBs — the New York City dive where many of the NY punks got started.

I never got to see the Ramones at CBGBs but I was lucky enough to see them very early on at one of Toronto’s most famous dive bars — the El Mocambo.

The show was absolutely packed but we where there early enough to get a spot directly in front of the stage. So close we could see Joey’s face despite his eternal mop-top and downward glare.

Johnny dropped a pick at one point and I snapped it up. I’ve still got it in a box in the basement. Johnny knew a thing or two about posterity and was nice enough to have “RAMONES” inscribed on all his picks making for instant memorabilia.

It was tradition at Clash concerts in the early days that they would end shows with White Riot. Fans would storm the stage, all hell would break lose. While I think you can find better video of The Clash in action, this footage gives you a sense of the frenzy and chaos that was a Clash gig.

July 24, 2007

August 19, 2005

I still on occasion run into people who laugh at the idea that “the Internet changes everything”. On most occasions I just smile, secure in the knowledge that it does and that someday the last few hold-outs will find something that causes even them to say, “whoa — that changes everything”.

Sometimes, when feeling generous and up for a debate, I’ll pull out a host of examples of radical change in culture and business. Today I think I may have found a new one to add to the list — CBC Unplugged.

CBCunplugged.com is a place for listeners to re-connect with their favourite personalities and shows, by way of podcasts that locked-out producers are making. It is not affiliated with the CBC. We all hope to be back at our jobs soon and put your programming on the radio.

Think about that for a moment. What happens when the CBC decides to lock-out workers? The staff route around the corporation and start putting shows online via podcasts. Brilliant. Kudos to Tod Maffin for shaking things up. I wonder if Dave Winer could have imagined a national broadcaster being disintermediated by that little white on orange rectangle?

November 17, 2004

The video takes DJ Danger Mouse’s mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album (hence “The Grey Album”) and footage from The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night, plus some great special effects to make something entirely new.

September 4, 2004

You Have Bad Taste in Music. I don’t know that for a fact, but Eman Laerton is out to convince Hoobastank, Nickelback, Train, Ruben Studdard and Linkin Park fans that they do.

Even if you don’t have bad taste in music you should visit the site. It is a fine example of the power of low-cost technology to create new forms of communication and entertainment. Eman has used a clever domain name, website, video camera, megaphone, and army helmet (seriously) to make something that is both entertainment and social commentary.

June 10, 2004

I was just trying out the new version of Napster and when I searched for “China Crisis” I got results that included David Sylvian and Asia albums.

Why might that be?

Well, David Sylvian used to be in a band called “Japan” which is close to China and “Asia” is where China is.

I’m surprised I didn’t get “Dishwalla” as one of the results!

Napster seems to have some sort of “concept” search algorithms in use that really doesn’t make sense in this context. Given that Napster knows I’m searching for an artist, it seems that there are two approaches to expanding search beyond the original term, “spelling” and “related projects”.

There are band and artist names that are hard to spell or that you only vaguely remember from youth (was “Hitchin’ A Ride” done by Vanity Fair or Vanity Fare?). In this case implementing something like Google’s “Did you mean…?” feature would be very smart. I want this kind of help so I don’t have to remember how to spell Alanis Morissette (Napster catches typos on her last name).

If I’m searching for “Tin Machine” it might be useful to offer results for frontman David Bowie as well. “Related Projects” searches could be very helpful particularly when you remember David Byrne singing some song but you don’t realize that it was from a solo album not a Talking Head disc.

The problem with Napster is a search on Tin Machine produces “Tony McKinney”, “More Machine Than Man”, “Nick Gilder and Time Machine” and (very oddly) “The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem”. These are guesses at possible typos but because they aren’t identified as such it looks like they have a really bad search feature.

Lessons Learned:

1. Smart search is dumb if it does not take into account the user’s goal in doing the search in the first place.

2. Tell the user why you are presenting results that are not expected (“No matches found for Tin Machine. Did you mean…? Artists related to Tin Machine include…”).

3. Hard code results for very popular searches so you can give really relevant information.

February 11, 2004

“The move comes as Puretracks — with a catalogue of more than 250,000 tracks — announced that it has crossed the one-million download threshold after roughly four months of operation. By comparison, Apple Computer Corp.’s iTunes service crossed the four-month mark with 10 million downloads, although that service’s U.S. customer base is also roughly 10 times the size of the comparable market in Canada.”

I would also note that Puretracks has Canada’s higher broadband penetration in its favor and greater proclivity to use file-sharing networks against it. So on the whole, Puretracks is doing at least as well as iTunes all things being equal. And given that they had a previously unknown brand while Apple had 20 years of headstart as a brand, I’d say they are doing pretty darn well.

December 18, 2003

I think the article is pretty much spot on in its analysis of the market and its rather buried assertion that Rhapsody (or at least the streaming model) will be the long term winner.

The article makes one mistake I believe. In discussing consumers’ natural desire to own music instead of subscribing to it, I think the point is missed. I’m pretty sure that the average North American spends more time listening to radio than to CDs. To me this implies that streaming services replace BOTH radio and CD purchases. While most people look at a service like Rhapsody as “Renting CDs” which doesn’t sound that interesting, I think of it as “Having a personal radio station that I control completely”. That does sound interesting. Particular for $10 a month.

The article also makes a small point about value conscious consumers baulking at subscription fees, but I think that the opposite is true. If you only had $10 to spend on music per month, would you buy ten downloads or subscribe to unlimited access to over 400,000 songs?

November 24, 2003

The Michael Jackson Official Press Room web site is just about my favourite example of a specific purpose site ever. The site does exactly what it is supposed to do and nothing else. While I in no way condone Jackson’s alleged conduct, his ability to use the web as a communication channel during a personal and business crisis is commendable.

October 28, 2003

“[So if margins are not great, how do you make money?] You make money by subscriptions: it is a better business…it is a continual, annuity business. You bundle a la carte downloads on top of that. You don’t necessarily make money in any of those by themselves; you make money in total. For example, the assets we used to build Rhapsody are the same that power RadioPass, the free music experience, and the upcoming store. So we spread the work of encoding, of creating metadata, of taking credit cards etc across four different services, and then international services. So you start spreading your costs across different yet related products, and two, through distribution and marketing.”

This is a great interview with lots of insights for those interested in where online music is headed. Anyone who’s used Rhapsody knows that Sean Ryan “gets it”.

September 19, 2003

September 14, 2003

“Obviously, the Internet is the best channel to share knowledge; when intellectual capital is shared with multiple online networks, it can spread quickly to others who naturally gravitate toward it. (We call this ‘Napsterizing your knowledge.’) Sharing knowledge is not the end-game; it’s the marketing. The next level is finding value that enthusiasts will pay for. Like Bowie says, performing will become exponentially more important for musicians. We would add that maintaining strong relationships with fans — their customers — has never been more important for artists than it is today.”

September 11, 2003

“P2P United, a peer-to-peer industry trade group that includes Grokster, StreamCast Networks, Limewire and other file-trading software companies, said Wednesday it had offered to reimburse Brianna Lahara and her mother’s payment to the Recording Industry Association of America. Lahara’s mother agreed Tuesday to settle copyright infringement charges on behalf of her daughter.”

Brianna could end up making a few dollars for a college education if this keeps up!